Sophie positions me on the couch, and then she disappears upstairs.

I'm not entirely sure what is going on. I thought things were going really well; we were having a great date, and then suddenly, she freaked out.

I should have seen it coming, though. It's what she does; whenever things get a little too real, she pushes me away.

I take a little comfort in the fact that I can see the hallway towards the front door from my seat on the couch, so she would have to pass by if she decided to make a run for it. But a small part of me worries she might rappel down from the balcony to get out of this conversation.

I wouldn't put it past her.

A few minutes later, I hear her come down the stairs, and she appears in the archway, carrying a cardboard box of the kind movers use.

I watch her silently as she slowly approaches me, setting the box on the coffee table and instantly removing her hands like it burned her. She wobbles on her feet, the flight instinct evident in her eyes.

I brace myself for what she might do, but after a couple of seconds, she sinks down beside me.

Neither of us says anything. She's staring at the box so intensely I'm surprised it hasn't caught fire yet, wringing her hands in her lap. She casts a glance at me, takes a deep breath, and then opens up the box.

From the angle of where I'm sitting, I can't see the contents, except something that looks like the top of a blond wig...

Sophie leans forward, picking something up from the box and handing it to me.

It's a picture of two young girls wearing white dresses. They are maybe around seven years old.

One of them is a little taller with shoulder-length dark brown hair. Her smile is small and secretive, but there's a dimple on each cheek, and even in this small photograph, I can see the golden color of her eyes.

Sophie.

She has her arm around the other girl, whose curly blond hair is falling down her back. She's got baby blue eyes and is wearing a megawatt smile.

I look up at Sophie next to me. Her eyes are darker, back to the onyx brown they take on whenever she closes herself off. She's staring intently at the item in my hands, biting her bottom lip.

"You and Jen?" I ask quietly.

She nods. "At our first communion."

"You were raised Christian?"

I don't know why I'm surprised. As I gather, she and Jen grew up together, and Jen always wears a cross around her neck and goes to church every Sunday. It would be a fair assumption that Sophie also used to practice Christianity. But I simply can't picture it.

Even with this photo in my hand.

"My parents are very religious," she says, shrugging.

I return my eyes to the picture, wondering why she showed it to me when she reaches into the box and pulls out another one, handing it to me.

They're almost identical. It's like someone used computer software to age up the girls in the first picture, and this is the result.

Sophie and Jen smiling at a camera, wearing white dresses. A decade might have passed between the two photos being taken.

In this one, Sophie's hair is up in a fancy updo, and the dress she's wearing is puffier, but the smile is the same, and she has her arm around Jen again.

The height difference is a little more prominent here, mirroring the one they have today. Jen is in a similar fancy dress, and half her blond hair is up, the rest falling curly around her face. She's wearing her signature black-rimmed glasses.

"Second communion?" I ask, cracking a smile.

Sophie's lips tug up at the corners as she shakes her head. "This is from our coming out."

I blink. Coming out as what?

She must see the confusion on my face because she takes a deep breath. "Our debutante ball."

It takes me a few seconds to realize what she said, and then I glance down at the picture in my hand again. Trying to wrap my head around the fact that the wild, reckless, elusive woman I've been chasing these past few months had a debutante ball.

And then something clicks. While I look into the golden eyes of picture Sophie, absentmindedly cringing at her looking this comfortable in a traditional setting, my mind connects the dots.

The communion, the standard dance lessons, the debutante ball, the fact that her favorite food is some fried dish I'd never heard of.

I look up at her, my jaw hitting the floor. "You're a southern belle."

Sophie's nostrils flare, her shoulders going stiff, but she nods. "I used to be anyway. Jen and I grew up in a suburb in Oklahoma City."

I frown. "But neither of you have an accent."

A wry smile curves Sophie's lips. "I wouldn't be too sure about that, sugar," she drawls, a lilt to her voice that I've never heard from her before. It's all long vowels and southern charm.

"Damn," I breathe. "Why did you change it?"

Sophie glances down at the picture in my hand. "We each had our reasons."

My eyebrows pull together, wondering what might have been Jen's reason. She doesn't strike me as the type to carry secrets.

Sophie picks up another item. It's a sheet of paper, and I can't see what it says, but it makes strained lines appear by Sophie's eyes. She looks at me over the edge of the paper. "That picture was taken the summer before I turned eighteen. I'd just graduated high school - a year earlier than my peers."

Why am I not surprised that she finished high school early?

"Jen had been talking about getting out of there for a while, but I didn't want to do that," she continues, clutching the paper tighter. "I got accepted to the same college where my parents went. Where they met each other. I pledged to the same sorority as my mother and my grandmother before her. I was a legacy."

I have no idea what to say. Everything she's saying is taking me by surprise. Sophie was a sorority girl? Really?

She hands me the paper. My eyes skim it, noticing her name at the top. It takes a while before I understand what I'm looking at. It's a diploma. For an undergrad degree in history from the University of Oklahoma. From three years ago.

"You graduated with a bachelor's at the age of nineteen?" I ask, incredulous. How is that even possible?

"Well, I did start a year early," Sophie says, shrugging. "My parents wanted me to get a degree, but mostly so I could get a good network, meet the right guy, settle down and become a stay-at-home mother." I almost choke at that, but Sophie goes on without noticing. "But I liked going to school, and I wanted to get a master's and maybe a Ph.D., so I figured I would hurry through my degrees. That way, my parents would still pay for it, and I could have kids before I got too old."

My eyes grow three sizes. "You wanted kids?"

Something passes over her expression, too fast for me to pinpoint it before she clenches her jaw and nods. She reaches into the box and hands me a doll. It's old and ragged, wearing a knitted pink dress.

"I used to play house all day. Jen got bored pretty quick, but not me. I loved pretending to be an adult." She eyes the toy in my hand with disdain; then, she takes out another one from the box. She handles it a little more carefully, and when I take it, I notice it's heavier. It's made of painted porcelain and has scarily lifelike blond hair. That's what I thought was a wig before.

"When I got too old to play with dolls, I started collecting these. My parents would get me one each year for my birthday. They were all over my room." A smirk appears on her face. "Jen absolutely hated them. She refused to sleep at my house because she thought they would come to life and eat her. I called that one Annabelle."

There's a spark of mischief in her eyes, telling me she did that solely to fuck with Jen. It makes me a little more comfortable to know that this version of Sophie that I'm only just learning ever excited wasn't a completely different person.

"You used to collect dolls," I say, trying to wrap my head around it. I suppose it's not too weird that a little girl liked dolls, but this seems more meaningful.

Sophie looks at me, her eyes swimming with past memories. She swallows. "I have always wanted to be a mother."

The words hit me square in the stomach. Not because of what she's saying, but because of the pained way she says it. Her mask splinters, and hurt spreads over her face.

"Then what happened?" I whisper.

"I met Brad," she says, looking away from me.

I lift an eyebrow. "Brad?"

"My first boyfriend."

Okay, I did not see that coming.

"Brad was exactly what my parents always wanted for me. And he was handsome, ambitious, and from a good family. He seemed like the perfect match. We started dating by the fall of my freshman year." She finds another picture. This one shows a slightly younger Sophie, dark brown hair and onyx eyes, tucked into the side of some preppy-looking blond dude. God, he looks like an asshole. "We were going to get married and start a family. As soon as he graduated."

I'm still unsure where this story is going, but since she didn't get married to preppy Brad and ride off into the sunset, something must have happened.

Sophie looks past me, her brows furrowing. "Do you know that feeling where you get home after a long day, and it isn't until you sit down and close your eyes that you realize that you have a raging headache?"

"Sure." Sometimes after an especially grueling practice, I don't realize just how sore my muscles are until I'm submerged in an ice bath.

"One day, about a year after I met Brad, I'd just finished up a midterm, and I was walking home, and suddenly I got this piercing pain in my lower stomach." She places a hand on her abdomen absentmindedly. "I hadn't noticed it before, but when I look back, it must have been there for a while."

I reach out, placing a hand on her thigh. Her eyes zero in on me again, and she sends me a small, sad smile.

"I went to my doctor, and he said that it was just my period. That didn't make sense to me, but he was the expert. After a while, my roommate dragged me to another doctor, much better, more pleasant too, who ran a bunch of tests. When she called me in for the results, she asked me to bring someone, so I took my mom."

She clenches her jaw, blinking. Her eyes haze over pulled back into the memory. "So I sat across from that competent, nice doctor as she proceeded to tell me that I was dying."

Everything stills around us, the edges of my vision go fuzzy, and the only thing I can see is the pain swirling in Sophie's eyes.

"Stage one endometrial cancer." Sophie frowns. "It's extremely rare in women under the age of thirty... I was nineteen."

Nineteen.

"The survival rate for stage one is high, but it often requires surgery. As you might imagine, I was opposed to that." She sends me a wry, bitter smile.

For a second, I don't understand what she's saying. Why would she not want surgery if it could save her life? Except endometrial cancer... I pull in a breath. "It was gonna make you infertile?"

She nods.

All she ever wanted was to be a mom, and suddenly she was told she might never be.

"But I was young, and they caught it early, so I begged them for alternatives, and they agreed. Six months of hormone therapy, which might cause the cancer to shrink. Give me a few years to get pregnant before..." She frowns, looking down at her hands, before shaking her head and giving me a very fake smile. "I had a semester left of undergrad, so I buckled down, studied my ass off. It was hard, but it would all be worth it when the treatment worked."

There is no sound in the room except for the low murmur of Sophie's teeth grinding together. "Six months later, the verdict was in... It didn't work. After that, there wasn't a lot to talk about. I needed surgery."

"What kind of surgery?"

Sophie leans forward, reaching into the box and pulling something new out. It's a hospital bracelet with her name on it. "Supracervical hysterectomy. Because I was young, they only took out my uterus. It increases chances of reoccurrence, but it prevents early menopause."

I keep my eyes on the small bracelet in my hands. Not because I think I'll learn anything from looking at it, but because I'm a little afraid of what I'll find when I look at Sophie again.

My gaze strayes to the items on the table in front of me. Pictures of a younger, happier Sophie. Proof of the life she lived—memorabilia representing the dreams she used to have.

She just wanted kids. And removing her uterus might not bring menopause, but it definitely killed that dream.

At nineteen.

Finally, I lift my head, ever so slowly, prolonging the moment until I lock onto Sophie. Her eyes are more glassy than I have ever seen them. The color has drained from her face, and she looks vulnerable.

So vulnerable.

"Afterwards-" Her voice breaks, and she coughs, blinking. "Afterwards, I started radiation. I didn't really see the point anymore if I'm being honest, but Jen..." She smiles, shaking her head a bit. "Jen made me promise I'd fight it. And well, I could never deny her what she wanted."

"It was good she did," I say, my voice hoarse. For a moment, we just look at each other. "What about, er, Brad?"

Sophie huffs, looking away. "He was very supportive in the beginning. He went with me to my treatments and told me it wasn't the end of the earth. That it would work, and we would still have the life we envisioned. But, um, after my surgery, he was meticulously absent. Then, a few days later, he showed up at the hospital with a bouquet of flowers, wishing me good luck, and he just left."

"What a fucking asshole." My voice sounds strained, coming through clenched teeth.

"No," Sophie says, rolling her shoulders. "I understand. We had a vision for our life together. A plan. I could no longer hold up my end of the bargain."

I want to argue, tell her how ridiculous that is. That when you love someone, things like this don't matter. You find a way - together. But when I look at the picture of the two of them, I get a feeling that love might not have been the prominent feeling between them.

"Anyway, he wasn't alone. All my sorority sisters ghosted me. A cancer patient is kinda a buzzkill. It was like people didn't know how to be around me anymore; honestly, I don't blame them. I wasn't Sophie anymore. I was just... I don't know."

"You're still Sophie," I say, grabbing her hands in her lap. She lifts her eyes to mine, tilting her head.

"To you maybe, but you didn't know the old Sophie."

"Maybe not. But I know the new one; I know this one." I squeeze her hands. "The real one. And she's a fucking badass."

A straggled laugh escapes her as she leans her head on my shoulder. I take that as permission to hold her, and pull her closer to me, placing a kiss on the top of her head. "So when the treatment ended, you came here?"

She nods against my chest, her voice muffled. "Yeah, I dropped out of college... It didn't really make sense to me anymore. And the only person who'd stood by me was Jen, so I went here. Started my new life."

I run a hand down her hair, all the information she's given me tumbling around in my head. This whole life she's lived erased in a few months.

"Thank you for telling me, Fie," I whisper. "I know it must have been hard."

She relaxes against me, letting out a big breath of air. "I trust you."

It's the last thing either of us says for a while. We just sit there, me holding her, caressing her hair and back, wishing there was something I could do. Something I could say to make it all better somehow. But I know there isn't. There is no magical cure for the pain she's reliving right now.

Eventually, her breathing slows down, evens out, and she slums in my grasp. I slide one arm underneath her legs and lift her. She doesn't stir, utterly exhausted after our conversation.

I carry her upstairs, placing her on the bed. Carefully, I remove her skirt and shirt, replacing the latter with one I find in her closet. I sit on the edge of the bed, running my hand over her hair.

She blinks, shifting a bit on the bed, her bleary eyes focusing on me. "You're staying?" she asks, voice thick with sleep.

I nod. "Of course, I'll stay," I say, but she's already gone, pulled under by unconsciousness, giving her a short, brief reprieve from the hurt.

Then I crawl under the covers and pull her body against mine, my chest constricting.

When I met her, I thought Sophie was just this good-times girl. Someone who didn't care for the responsibilities of the world. Who couldn't be bothered with anything lasting because it stopped her from going wherever the wind took her.

But now I realize how wrong I was. Because maybe... Maybe her aversion against commitment isn't about the confines of forever, but because she, better than anyone, knows how fragile the future is and that forever doesn't always last. 

A/N:
So that was heavy 🥺

What do you all think? ➡️

I'm going to change my updating schedule to Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday. Lots of Jayphie coming your way 😉

- Hanna 💙